


Carbon Cycles

by samsarapine



Category: Saiyuki Gaiden
Genre: Blanket Permission, M/M, Multi
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-01-01
Updated: 2013-01-01
Packaged: 2017-11-26 01:05:24
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 7,934
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/644841
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/samsarapine/pseuds/samsarapine
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>For forty-plus years, Homura's tried to create a new world.  Maybe he started too big.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Carbon Cycles

**Author's Note:**

  * For [7veilsphaedra](https://archiveofourown.org/users/7veilsphaedra/gifts).



> Many, many thanks to the Merciful Goddess for all of her assistance and blessings, and to Whymzycal for her amazing beta help. All remaining mistakes are my own. Written for the 2012 Saiyuki 7th Night Smut Fest.

**Carbon Cycles**

_Lung-choke tarmac, jackhammer artillery, whining cranes and hollow echoes of bird-wing scaffolding, drifting sandblaster grit, the beat, beat, beat of New York dying and resurrecting with only one constant, one unifying red thread of fate running through it._

_Greed._

_Strip the world bare, bedrock raised, razed, and the seas drained, molecules crushed to atoms, dangling electrons and protons and neutrons, like tears, like diamonds, like king cake babies before the masses, suspended._

_It won't be enough. It will never be enough._

A bump and a "watch it, dude," pulls Homura out of his head, interrupts his composition, but it doesn't matter because his thoughts are bedrock, more secure than any vault, more eloquent than Shakespeare, because this is what he knows, what's in his gut and soul and heart, and it will be there long after he turns home to type two thousand words of contempt for the whole 'Occupy' movement.

He's one of the originals, after all. These kids, with their '99 percent' rhetoric, don't have a goddamned clue what it's really all about. The years he's put in to expose the truths behind the lies dished out by people in power, to make their pathetic little lives better, and now, here they are, with their holier-than-thou privileged attitudes and free libraries and health clinics and iPads and tweets, whining because they want more.

Fucking greed.

Zuccotti Park is packed, and it smells of spoiled food and piss and diesel fumes and autumn, and it's noisy in a way that reminds Homura more of flocking birds or third-world street markets than of serious protesters. The trees are nearly bare of leaves, so he can see the multitudes clearly, the cops lining the area just outside the park, the clumps and eddies and swirls of the encampment, the frustrated office workers flipping the finger in the general direction of the protesters, the mirror-glass power-class fortress of buildings around the park reflecting the hundreds of people into thousands, and thousands again.

 _R &B_ is paying good money for an article about the 'new activism' from a long-time radical activist's point of view. He's read some of his contemporaries' stories, their approval of the movement, the way they gloss over the underlying shit that motivates these people. Sell-outs, all of them. He isn't.

It's up to him to expose the real truth. 

"Fuck me," he hears behind him. He ignores it, but then the voice says, "Homura?" so he turns.

Recognition is instant, and it hits him: funny, how time works. He's had the feeling before, but rarely so strong as it is now, when his past stands in front of him. "Kenren," he says, not really believing it, not wanting to believe it because he's left this part of the past behind him and has no interest in revisiting it. Too much baggage, too many messed up feelings, and all of them threaten to flood him at just the sight of Kenren, like a levee on the verge of breaking.

"Hey, man," and Kenren's pulling him into a hug, in the middle of Zuccotti Park. Some of the protesters clap, a few "peace, dudes," and "yeah, bros," sprinkled liberally along with nods of approval. Homura despises the lack of privacy. "Last I heard, you were in Thailand."

Kenren's hair is long, a gray braid nearly to his ass. Homura can feel the wiry strength of Kenren's lean body, no middle-age softness blurring the lines between Kenren past and present. 

"That was three years ago," Homura says, pulling back and re-establishing his personal space. Kenren's eyes are as sharp and appraising and lazy as ever, and Homura resents his grin as he backs away a step to give Homura room, hands up. 

"Still touchy," Kenren says. "It's cool." The lines in his face are deeper, but a cigarette dangles from his mouth, a permanent fixture that Homura recognizes from his memories of the sixteen-year-old delinquent he met so many years before. Kenren's hairline's receded, but not as far as Homura's, though nobody can tell these days, not since Homura started shaving his head. Jeans, chains, biker boots, and a worn vest over a white t-shirt, both ears hung with piercings and tattoo sleeves down both arms. "It's cool," he repeats, and Homura sees the flash of a tongue stud behind his grin. "I should have known you'd be hanging around here."

"I'm not part of this," Homura snaps. "I'm here for a story."

"Riiiight." Kenren finishes his cigarette, and in violation of the new New York smoking ordinances fuck-one through Z, drops it on the ground and steps on it. "I'm meeting someone uptown." He's got a shit-eating grin on his face, so Homura knows better than to trust him. "Come on. Let's get a beer or ten."

"The last time I saw you, you gave me a black eye," Homura reminds him.

Kenren's grin stretches into a smile, suspiciously affectionate. "You deserved it, you bastard."

"I know tai kwon do." Homura's damned if he's going to get another black eye without giving back in spades.

"No shit? I do, too." Kenren shakes his head. "It's broad daylight, man. Stop being a paranoid son-of-a-bitch, and let's go get a beer."

.oO0Oo.

The bar Kenren takes him to is way the hell uptown, in East Harlem, just off 5th Avenue – mostly neighborhood people, mostly Spanish-speaking, mostly rough, and Homura thinks, _I should have known who Kenren'd be meeting._

It's Tenpou. Tenpou, the crazy bastard who fascinates the hell out of everyone he meets while simultaneously scaring them shitless, including Homura. A couple of times over the years, Homura's tried to track him down, see if he's still around, but it was as if Tenpou had never existed. He's figured Tenpou died a while ago no internet references, no credit reports, no phones or addresses, not even a hint of his existence through Homura's off-line contacts.

They order beers and pull chairs over to Tenpou's table. 

"I thought you were dead," Homura says, not bothering to waste words of greeting. Tenpou looks unchanged in a scary way: his black, not-a-gray-strand-in-sight hair still hacked into the mullet that he'd worn for twenty years before it became trendy, a trend that was thankfully short-lived, because Homura had always thought it made Tenpou look like a cross between a pharmacist and a serial killer. He still does, Homura realizes. Tenpou's lean, the in-your-twenties kind of lean that's impossible for someone who's close to sixty to pull off, no pot belly, no new lines in his face, still has the glasses, still looks as if the rest of the world doesn't exist except when it pops into existence because he wants it to.

He's not surprised when Tenpou doesn't answer. He seems fixated on the pieces of what looks like a watch scattered across the table in front of him.

"He lives off the grid," Kenren says. "Crashes at my place when he's in New York."

Homura's heard the urban myth about dodging the grid, too, but it's never really been true. You're always found. But it's Tenpou. "You can do that?"

Kenren leers. "Sure, you can crash at my place anytime. Don't you have your own place here, though?"

Homura shoots a glare at him. "I meant, live off the grid."

"It's not so hard," Tenpou suddenly offers. He looks up and meets Homura's eyes. "Especially if people think you're dead."

"You're so fucked up." Homura never could get Tenpou: the man seems, has always seemed, fucked in the head, but Homura has never been able to figure out if Tenpou is a psychopath or just the most brilliant man he knows. _As long as he doesn't kill anyone around me,_ he thinks, and lets it go. "You're not drinking. Want a beer?"

Tenpou smiles and Homura's breath catches, heat flows through him, and it's all there again, the lust and the fascination, as if the forty or so years since the last time he saw Tenpou didn't exist.

Kenren wriggles his fingers into the pocket of his skin-tight jeans and waves his free hand at the bartender. "I'll get a pitcher."

"Do dead men drink beer?" Homura asks Tenpou, damned if he's going to give in to his hormones.

"I do," Tenpou murmurs, and his sidelong glance is amused. He knows, Homura can tell, and it pisses him off more. "I can't speak for others, of course." He glances at Kenren, who shrugs and turns to look at Homura.

It's as if Tenpou's words and the shared glance between he and Kenren have re-awakened all of the old dynamics. Homura holds his breath and realizes that Kenren is holding his, too, and they're all staring at each other, fight-or-flight instincts on high, and even though Homura can't speak for them, either, he suspects they're also weighing whether it would be best to go their separate ways, beat the shit out of each other, or fuck each other until they bleed.

The bartender drops a pitcher and three new glasses at their table and the spell is broken. Kenren pays him, Tenpou moves his crap out of the way, and Homura relaxes a bit. He feels a smile forming, some of it a release of tension, some of it just the fact that here are two men he's never expected to see again and there's still a connection of a sorts between them, and pours them each a fresh glass. "To dead men and beer," he says, raising a glass. He drinks.

Kenren and Tenpou smile, raise their glasses, and drink.

.oO0Oo.

"Those punks on Wall Street piss me off," Homura says, glaring at his last fry.

"They're us," Kenren says, yawning and pushing away his plate. "Of course they piss you off."

The burgers and fries had been good, and they've absorbed some of the beer in Homura's system, so he can think more clearly again. Which is good because Kenren, like always, is wrong. He's so indolently simple-minded. Homura suspects it's because it's easier to be an idiot than to look at things as they really are.

"They're not the same as us," Homura insists. "We wanted to drop out, form a counter-culture, stop a war. They just want to get their slice of the pie."

"'Inequalities diminish us all,'" Tenpou says absently.

"Don't quote my own words back at me," Homura snarls, feeling stung.

"Oh, they're yours? I wondered where I'd heard it." He's fiddling with another damned watch, the third one, Homura thinks, though he's a little fuzzy about the count.

Tenpou's such a prick. Homura can't figure out why he's not more pissed about it. Maybe because even if Tenpou doesn't remember that Homura wrote those words, they've stuck with him. Like he's carrying a part of Homura with him, in his soap bubble existence outside the world everyone else inhabits. Like Homura's there, if not acknowledged.

"Remember '71?" Kenren asks. "After we got out of that D.C. jail?"

Three of more than 12,000 protesters arrested, crammed standing-room only into cells and bussed to hell and back and held in pens like pigs when the jails couldn't hold any more. After they were released, Homura remembers a VW pop-top camper, bright orange, bought from a hippie couple for a hundred bucks while slumming the Georgetown University campus, the smog and oppressively hot early June morning when they left behind shit food and shit iron bars and a shit government that still hadn't repealed the draft, much less ended the war in Vietnam. The pop-top died on the way up Pike's Peak, so they'd sold it for fifty bucks to a fat guy with greasy hair who was generous with his cigarettes, and then had hiked and hitched the rest of the way to San Francisco and The Haight only to find that nothing was left but ghosts and pretenders and tourists. But it was cool, it was fine, they'd just followed the long, gorgeous California coastline that led them to Mexico, where they'd gone their separate ways: Kenren to the ocean, Tenpou to the mountains, and him back to the city he'd vowed to take for his own. 

Not that he spends much time in New York.

"Can't get lost like that anymore," Kenren continues. "Hell, now you're tagged and tracked everywhere you go. No more goddamned freedom. Well," he adds, glancing sideways and jerking his head toward Tenpou, "not unless you're like him." 

Tenpou beams and hums to himself. Homura thinks the watch is a cheap Timex this time; Tenpou has disemboweled it across his half-eaten reuben. A piece lies in a catsup puddle.

Homura winces. "Doesn't catsup gum up the works?"

Tenpou picks the piece up and puts it in his mouth, sucks on it, his face reflective, and spits it into his hand. He lays it somewhere in the watch, and inner workings begin to move. "Catsup. I'll remember that." 

"I gotta smoke," Kenren says. He stands and pulls out his cigarettes. "Let's get out of here."

Tenpou closes the back of the watch. "Hmm," he agrees, holding out his hand. Kenren gives him the pack Luckies, shit smokes, no filters and Tenpou shares them out as they leave the bar, then stuffs the rest of the pack into his pocket.

"Hey, those are mine," Kenren says, but he says it like he doesn't expect Tenpou to hear him, and for all Homura can see, Tenpou doesn't. Kenren passes around his lighter and snags it from Tenpou before it disappears, too. Another look seems to flash between them, but Homura decides to ignore it. It's their business, not his.

He takes a deep drag.

The moon's half out, a semi-circle balanced between light and dark. Homura blows smoke at it, but not enough to obscure it. If he weren't so drunk, he'd probably find something profound or symbolic in it, but right now, he's satisfied. They're walking along the edge of Central Park, and on his right side, the trees absorb the New York night noise. Homura feels like maybe he's walking the line that separates the dark and light of New York, if he were on the moon looking back at the half-lit city hovering in the dark vacuum of space. 

They can't walk side by side; the street's too busy for that, so Homura finds himself trailing behind Kenren, who's following Tenpou. Homura's filled with a need to walk, to go somewhere and do something, so even though he's not all that interested in continuing to hang out with the two men they have shit in common, anymore, maybe always had just shit in common but didn't see it Tenpou and Kenren are moving, so he's damned if he's going to fall behind.

Tenpou's moving pretty fast, in fact, so Homura puts out the butt of his cigarette and jogs to catch up, just in time to follow him and Kenren through a park gate and into the trees. They cut across the lawn and the bike path, until Tenpou leads them to a cleared place by the water, behind a big-ass tree and out of the lights. They sit down, leaning against the tree. Kenren breaks out a new pack of cigarettes, and they all light up.

It's quiet, the half-moon visible over the Meer, the night air just cold enough to keep people on the paths moving. Other than the smell of their illegal cigarette smoke, Homura figures no one knows they're there. Kenren's body is warm against his, Tenpou's breath occasionally brushes against his neck, and for the moment, Homura's content to just sit by the water with two men he knew forty-odd years ago and doesn't know now, and smoke.

"So, you make good money writing freelance?" Kenren's shoulder digs into Homura's arm.

"I don't do it for the money," Homura says. Kenren knows that. Asshole.

"Well, you sure as hell can't do it without," Kenren replies. 

Homura glances over but can't catch Kenren's eye to see if Kenren's fucking with him. "I make enough."

The tip of Kenren's cigarette glows red. "It shows," he says on his exhalation.

"What do you mean?" Homura's immediately on the defensive; Kenren has a habit of striking out randomly, sometimes words, sometimes fists.

"Nothing," Kenren says. 

"Then shut up." 

"You're a pretty pissed-off guy." Kenren's observation doesn't seem to contain any malice. "But then you've always been a passionate son-of-a-bitch."

"Well, what the fuck do you expect?" Homura demands. "I've gone to every shithole in the world, nearly got my ass shot off in a half-dozen wars, have a readership in the millions, and still nothing's changed. I miss the damned Cold War. A few hydrogen bombs might get people's attention."

Kenren snorts. "Are you a fucking idiot? Don't say that shit in public. Especially not here, in this city."

"'All action starts with a thought,'" Tenpou says. He crushes his cigarette out on the bottom of his shoe. "I read that somewhere."

"It's another one of my goddamned quotes," Homura growls. 

"I hadn't realized I'd read so much of your work," Tenpou says. He wedges his shoulder behind Homura's and pushes close. "Or maybe you're just saying the same thing as the other people before you, do you think?"

That stings, stings bad, and for a brief, white-hazed moment, Homura wants to kill Tenpou, cut out his tongue for saying something that shitty to him.

Slowly the haze fades, and instead of rage, Homura feels a stirring of defeat. "Maybe," he says. Because the thing is, Tenpou is right, no words are original, no thoughts unthought. Homura has been feeling like a hypocrite for years and trying to bury it. Most of the time, he's successful.

"Meeting Kenren wasn't a coincidence, was it?" he suddenly realizes.

Tenpou makes a noncommittal sound, while Kenren's cigarette glows again.

"Why?"

"Why not?"

"What do you want from me?"

Kenren laughs, a short, sharp sound. "What did we ever want from you?"

"Don't fuck with me," Homura warns. He shifts, preparing to stand up, walk off, leave the assholes behind for another forty years.

"Don't go," Tenpou says behind him. Homura feels Tenpou's hand on his shoulder.

"Look," Kenren says. "Look at it this way. You're pissed off at the whole fucking world. And a good portion of the world is pissed off at you. Maybe it's time to take a break."

"They're so damned privileged," Homura says, but he settles back. 

Tenpou shifts, and suddenly he's kneeling in front of Homura, glasses reflecting the streetlight, making his eyes invisible. "And you aren't?"

So Homura looks at himself, a featureless, dark shadow reflected in Tenpou's glasses, embarrassed and defiant, but he looks because part of him still wants Tenpou's … Attention? Approval? Whatever. He looks.

No obvious tags because he refuses to be a walking billboard. But the jeans are discreetly expensive, the black tank worth an obscene amount of money, considering the people who had been exploited to farm the cotton, harvest it, mill it to thread, mass-produce the clothing, and had received little, if any, of the money he'd paid for it. His Doc Martens are scuffed, but the leather is top quality; his belt the same; his necklace is gold, fine as hair; his watch, the only advertisement visible, is a _Vacheron Constantin_ because they're amazing watches made by a fucking great watchmaker. The only thing cheap about him is his black denim jacket, because when he's traveling, if he goes from cold to hot, it's the best item of clothing to ditch if he needs the packing space for something else. 

"You're a prick, Tenpou," he says.

"Always," Tenpou agrees.

"There's only one thing to do," Homura decides. He takes off his jacket, pulls his tank off over his head, and starts unbuckling his belt.

"Strip?" Kenren laughs. "Naked's the answer?"

Homura doesn't bother replying because Kenren's always been an asshole who states the obvious. Instead, he loosens the ties of his Doc Martens and toes them off, and then pulls his jeans off. He dumps his socks on top of the pile.

Fuck the fact that it's fall, and it's starting to get fuck-all cold beside the Meer. His Calvins are last, and then he's standing in the north end of Central Park, stark naked.

"You certainly don't look like them anymore," Tenpou observes.

"Is that new ink?" Kenren pokes the ankh on Homura's hipbone.

Homura swats his hand away. "Hands off."

"Ten years old, give or take," Tenpou says, tilting his head.

"Oh, yeah, I remember your story on Egypt," Kenren says. "You get it then?"

"I wasn't referring to the tattoo," Tenpou says, his voice mild as buttered bread.

"I'm at least twelve," Kenren says, and he doesn't sound offended at all, which is about right for Kenren.

"Yeah, I got it in Cairo," Homura says. Now that he's naked, he's not quite sure what to do. He nudges his pile of discarded clothing with his foot. A cabbie wouldn't turn down a naked fare, would he? No, not in this city. He bends to fish his wallet out of his jeans pocket. Fuck reunions, he's going home. He still has to write the damned article.

A large, warm hand settles on his ass. "I said, hands off."

The hand moves, and it has to belong to Kenren since Tenpou is standing in front of Homura. "I don't think so," Tenpou murmurs and takes Homura's face in his hands. He's in Homura's personal space, his breath warm on Homura's skin, his hands clamped firm to both sides of Homura's face, too strong to deny, not that Homura wants to, and his tongue is slick and tastes of beer and catsup and cigarettes and maybe watch parts, Homura doesn't know, but he likes the taste, likes its complexity, and behind him he feels both of Kenren's hands now, kneading his ass and pulling his cheeks apart to let the night air kiss his asshole.

He's done this before. They've done this before. It's not new.

He's been everywhere, Afganistan to Zimbabwe, Antarctica to the Outback, and he's done everything, sex, drugs, deserts, jungles, raw cocaine deals in Cartagena. He's reported wars, famines, pestilences, and plagues, traveling the horse tracks left by the Apocalypse. He's seen kids in pieces from landmines hidden in dry, barren fields devoid of food because starving people were too afraid to farm them. He's seen hostage crises and the Munich Massacre, the slaughter of innocent Palestinians by Israeli soldiers, bloated bodies pulled from Louisiana homes submerged by the ocean. 

He's seen so much death. Sometimes he thinks it's all he sees, anymore. He's sick of it.

 _No,_ he thinks. _That's not right. I'm inured to it._

The revelation finally gives his fury a point, a target, an identity, and it's different from the cause he's been thinking it was.

Because he's been projecting that anger on the stupid, innocent idiots in the Occupy movement that haven't seen any of that, but still want, and want, and want like he'd wanted when he was young, and were trying to do something about it, just like he had, believed the world could be changed, just like he had.

He realizes that somewhere, inside, he hates himself, hates himself as much or more than he hates the protesters. Has done, for a long time. He feels the revelation like he feels the ache of teasing a broken tooth with his tongue, painful but unable to stop pushing on it.

And yeah ?yeah, in fact ?Kenren-the-clueless-bastard's _right, naked_ is the answer, naked is the essence and truth and the humanity in the animal and the animal in humanity, and Kenren's hands feel hot on his skin, and he moves into the caress, feels Kenren's hand dip lower to trace around his asshole, lower still to skim his sac, and damn, it's like he's fifteen again, never had sex before, is feeling everything for the first time, wondering if it's all going to be this good, if any pain that may come of it will be worth this level of pleasure, and pretty sure it will be.

So it's not new, but it is, in a way. It's been a few years since he last had sex with a guy and a few more before that since he's had sex with more than one person at a time. The kissing isn't just kissing, it's making out, like time has rocketed from now back to when he first made out with Tenpou all those years ago, and beneath Tenpou's shirt, his skin is soft and smooth over hard muscle, and Homura can feel Tenpou begin to react to his caresses. Kenren's fingers are digging into his ass with firm, confident strokes, thumbs holding him open every few circles, playing with his asshole, and the nerves there haven't been stimulated in a while so it makes Homura shiver, and Kenren's grip is more secure and confident now than it was back then, but it's still the same hands, the hands of their youth, of their innocence, of the boys who were becoming the men they became.

He wants more, so he pushes Tenpou's jacket off his shoulders and unbuttons his shirt, pulling the shirt-tails out of Tenpou's jeans. Tenpou _hmm_ s into his mouth and presses closer, and Homura slides his hand up Tenpou's chest, palming a hard pectoral, rubbing it in circles until the nub of Tenpou's nipple brushes the sensitive skin in the palm of Homura's hand. Tenpou groans, releases Homura's head, lets his jacket and shirt slide down his arms and pool on the ground at their feet, then unzips his jeans.

Homura takes that as an invitation. He brushes his fingers down Tenpou's torso, pressing into his navel and tracing the arc of his athlete's girdle underneath the denim. He pushes Tenpou's jeans down over his hips until it encircles his upper thighs, then presses him into the tree and continues to kiss him. Tenpou seems fascinated by Homura's baldness, and strokes Homura's head, lighter over the bare skin and harder over the stubble that's grown since Homura shaved it this morning, like he likes the contrast between smooth and rough.

Kenren's hands disappear, but Homura's regret is fleeting because not only does Kenren return within moments, all naked, hot skin draped over his back and lazily humping his ass, rubbing his hard, hot cock along Homura's crack, but Tenpou's hand is around Homura's cock and pumping it to the same tempo as Kenren's movements, and it's almost perfect, except it isn't because it's not quite intense enough to let him lose himself in the sensations, and he hates and loves that they're teasing him like this. Then Kenren stops moving against Homura and slides down his body, until Homura can feel Kenren's breath on his ass.

Kenren pulls apart Homura's ass cheeks again, chuckles, and presses his tongue flat over Homura's anus, more teasing, before he starts to lick and finger him in earnest.

Homura's been rimmed before. He's been rimmed by experts, in fact. But, fuck, Kenren should be teaching a class on rimming because between the warm, smooth slide of his tongue, the alien weight of his tongue stud, and whatever the hell he's using to make Homura's anus tingle like it's lit with icy Christmas tree lights, Homura's getting the best fucking rimming of his life. He's standing on his toes, trying to get the leverage to press himself harder against Kenren's mouth while not relinquishing Tenpou's.

Kenren starts tongue-fucking him, and that tingling sensation and the unyielding stud go deeper inside Homura, and that's it, he can't help it, he needs more, so he pulls away from Tenpou's kisses and awkwardly turns to grab Kenren by his shoulder to pull him closer, lick him deeper.

Behind him, Kenren chuckles again, warm exhalations against Homura's hyper-sensitive skin. "Pushy. I forgot that." He stands and pulls at Homura's hips. "Move back. Brace yourself against the tree no," he says, as Homura pulls away from Tenpou, who's still stroking his cock. "I want you to hold onto the tree around him, then I want Tenpou to fuck your mouth while I fuck your ass."

Homura bends further, inches his feet back until he's at the proper angle, and braces himself. "I don't know if I can hold this long," he warns.

"I'll help," Tenpou murmurs, and Homura feels Tenpou's hands hook under his armpits. Tenpou's cock pokes him in the cheek, hard, a droplet welling from its tip. "I'm going to fuck your mouth quite hard," he says.

"Big talk," Homura says, but he hopes he can take it from both ends without disgracing himself.

"Leave your mouth open and relaxed so I can move down your throat."

Homura's cock is softening without Tenpou's hand stroking it, and his head clears a bit. He tries to make his mouth as wet as he can, then opens it, allowing saliva to escape. Tenpou presses in slowly, moving gently while he waits for Kenren. Behind him, Homura hears Kenren fumbling with something, then slicked fingers rub down his crack, one dipping into his ass. A moment later, it's replaced by something much larger, hot and hard, and Homura realizes he's completely forgotten to ask whether the other men are clean or not. He hopes Kenren is wearing a condom.

Kenren moves a few times, seating himself as Homura's ass relaxes. Homura's jaw is already beginning to ache and his arm muscles to cramp; with luck, the other two will be hair-trigger enough to get things done with quickly. In fact, right now, a bed sounds great.

Maybe he should suggest they go back to his -

Kenren thrusts hard, Tenpou meets the thrust, and in seconds, Homura's not thinking about comfort or aching body parts, because fuck! his ass and mouth are full, and Kenren's fingers are bruising his hips, and Tenpou's hands are warm and strong beneath his arms, and Tenpou's cock is brutal and hard and salty and bitter and familiar in a distant memory sort of way, while Kenren's hitting his prostate with every stroke. Something brushes his hip and back in counter-point to Kenren's thrusts, and Homura realizes it's Kenren's braid, heavy and cold and distracting, which is just what Homura needs because otherwise he's going to come way too soon.

He stops thinking and lets his instincts take over. Gut-deep primal need courses through him, the need for warmth, the need for companionship, the need for feel-good endorphins flowing through his veins like the best drugs. His asshole clenches around Kenren's cock, elicting a groan he can feel through Kenren's hands, his cock; saliva flows from his mouth and is splattering on his arms and chest as Tenpou surges forward and back.

And through it all, his prostate is screaming, thrills running through his body, almost painful, definitely pleasurable, and he's so full his balls feel like they're being stroked from the inside out. Kenren and Tenpou have set a punishing pace, and their panting and heat are all Homura knows: panting, heat, salt, sweat, the imprints of twenty separate fingers and through it all, the raw, buzzing need to come, to plunge deep inside something hot and warm and wet and let his body explode.

And then it does. His balls contract and pulse and his cock is hot and cold at the same time, his heart beating in time to his discharge, and the orgasm rockets through him from his toes to his mouth. A groan leaks from him, and he feels Tenpou shudder and thrust harder.

When his balls finally relax, it's all Homura can do not to slump to his hands and knees. But Kenren's hands hold up one end of his body and Tenpou's hands hold the other, and now he can hear their moans, feel their bodies straining as they each strive for climax, pounding into his body.

Homura manages to keep himself positioned as first Kenren, and then Tenpou, comes. Then he lets himself crumple to the ground, the other two men catching him enough to make sure he isn't hurt. There's no dribble of come down his legs, so Kenren must have used a condom, but his face is wet with come and spit, his arms and legs are shaking uncontrollably, his jaw aches, and he's definitely not twenty any more.

"What the hell did you use while you were rimming me?" Homura pants. He wipes his arm across his mouth and chin but just succeeds in smearing the come and saliva more, so he reaches for the nearest article of clothing and uses it, instead.

Kenren answers on a breathless laugh, "Mints. Strong ones."

"Gotta remember that," Homura says. "Pretty good shit." He drops the cloth on the ground and, feeling cleaner, closes his eyes. The warmth of the two other bodies pressed against him feels great.

After he catches his breath, after his heart rate's closer to normal, Homura opens his eyes again and stares up at the remaining leaves on the tree. The leaves are small darknesses against a lighter, larger darkness, and it hits him: gradations of gray are natural. Sort of cool, in fact. Not like they're shades of hypocrisy, but like they're leaves and space at night. He drifts a bit, a grayness within graynesses, mind the color of liquid gunmetal.

A splash wakes him, and he pushes himself into a sitting position. 

Tenpou, the maniac, is in the Meer, his pale ass high and tight before it disappears beneath the black water. He starts swimming toward the island.

A moment later, Kenren is right behind him, and Homura's all alone on the bank, with an ass and jaw that hurt and the knowledge that even if he starts swimming now, he'll still probably be last, and damn it, he's as good a swimmer as either of those two losers. He dives in, gasps with the cold, and strikes out to catch up.

"Christ," Kenren sputters as Homura finally joins them. Kenren and Tenpou are treading water, Tenpou laughing. "It's fucking cold!"

Homura wipes a hand over his face to get the water out of his eyes. He's laughing because yes, the water is fucking cold, and he hasn't skinny-dipped in years, and as cold as the water is, it's also warmer in places, and it glides over his body like silk, like sex, like time. Tenpou swims up to him, and before Homura can react, he's kissing him, and the heat of Tenpou's tongue and the cold of the water hitting his chin is fucking perfect. Then it's Kenren, then Tenpou again, and it becomes a game of mouth tag to see who is best at kissing while floundering in a freezing cold lake in the middle of the night, and Homura laughs and laughs and right now, he really loves these bastards.

If he were writing about it, he thinks he'd use words like 'baptism' and 'purify,' which is ironic, considering the probable quality of the water they're in, but true because it's perfect, the moment is perfect and he feels like he's coming alive again after being dead.

"Fuck!" Kenren pulls back from their latest kiss, his gaze trained on something over Homura's shoulder, so he rotates himself in the water just in time to see three kids picking up their clothes. One of them looks out at them and grins, a huge shit-eating grin that's white in the moonlight, and Homura could almost swear he sees a flash of gold in his wide, old-young eyes. Then the kids are running and the three of them are swimming hell-bent for the shore to catch the goddamned brats.

Homura hits the shallows first and bursts out of the Meer at a run, bare feet slapping on the cold ground, then on asphalt as he hears the kids laughing to his left, further along the bike path. He sprints toward the sound, shouting fuck knows what, probably 'stop' and 'you little bastards' and other futile shit, until he needs all of his breath for running. Behind him, he hears two sets of feet pounding and finally registers that Kenren is shouting, "shut up, you stupid bastard! Someone's going to call the cops!"

The kids' laughter takes a sharp turn to the right, and Homura runs after it, nearly committing suicide by taxi as he erupts into the street in front of a cab. The cab swerves and blares its horn, the driver's arm extends with middle finger raised at Homura, and the cabbie yells a fine collection of curses that would have condemned Homura to hell if he wasn't already on his way there, and then he's panting, naked, on 5th Avenue, and he hasn't got a fucking clue where the brats went.

"Damn it!" he shouts. "Fuck!" He turns to glare at Kenren and Tenpou.

Who are doubled over, laughing. Kenren's pointing at him and, between bouts of laughter, is gasping something about "You looked," and "White ass," which sends him into renewed howls. Tenpou's laughing so hard he's silent with it, completely out of breath and voice. He falls to his knees, arms curled around his stomach, and he looks like he might be in some serious pain, except that Homura knows he isn't.

"Man," Kenren finally says coherently, wiping an arm across his eyes, "you're damned fast when you run, aren't you?" He's still chuckling. "If you could have seen your pasty white ass---" and then he's off again, and now Tenpou is actually rolling on the sidewalk, he's laughing so hard. And Homura gets it, he really does, he gets how stupid he looks, he can imagine how his ass glowed like the half-full moon, but damn it! he _liked_ that watch, and now it's gone, and it cost him fifteen thousand dollars and a shrapnel wound that still aches in the winter.

"Oh, dear," Tenpou wheezes, "that was a lovely run!"

And, like it often happens when Tenpou says something, the world shifts into a place it wasn't just a second ago, and Homura's thinking, _it was_. If he hasn't skinny-dipped in years, he can't remember the last time he ran naked through a park at night. Hell, he may never have done it before. There was something liberating about it, something wild and primal and amazing.

Though it still doesn't feel like an equal trade for his watch. Damn. He'd really loved that fucking watch.

Out of the corner of his eye, he catches a glimpse of red and blue light, and his heart sinks. 

For a second, he wonders if he can run fast enough and far enough to hide before the cops actually get here, but by the time the second passes, they're here, and he's looking at an officer less than half his age, with a bored, jaded look to him that Homura's pretty sure he himself hadn't developed until well past thirty. Kenren's head is bowed, but he's still chuckling as another cop handcuffs him, and Tenpou simply beams at everyone and everything, saying nothing.

The cuffs are cold around Homura's wrists, and he's shivering, and saying, "No, officer," and "Yes, officer," and briefly contemplating giving them a false name before he finally gives them his real one, because hell, if they by some miracle do recover his watch, he sort of wants it back. Behind him, he hears Kenren give the cops his standard alias from when they were kids, "Holden Cumberbatch," the stupidest-sounding name ever invented, and Tenpou politely offering, "Henry Caulfield," to the officer questioning him, and all Homura can think is, _you stupid bastards, do you think the cops haven't already heard a thousand variations of that name?_ because hell, Salinger is almost synonymous with New York.

So Homura stands, still naked, still on 5th Avenue, and listens and shivers, harder all the time, while the kid-cop reads him his Miranda rights, right off the card, just like they do on the reality tv shows. And weirdly, like all of the other weird things that have happened today, he feels pathetically old but that's gloriously right because he is what he is and who he is and age and shivering are just parts of that; he'd be lying if he said he hasn't had a hell of a great day, overall. In fact, getting arrested by New York cops makes him feel young again in a way he hasn't felt since he was arrested in D.C. Yeah, he's been arrested quite a few times since then, but never in the U.S., and foreign cops have a different feel to them the experience is altogether different, and you always get the feeling that if you don't project authority and maturity and recite the American Embassy number by heart, a foreign cop will spit on you and throw away the key because you're a stupid punk American.

He hears the cop talk about fines and jail time, and the list of crimes he's committed while naked seems pretty endless, not the simple 'indecent exposure, public nudity, making a public nuisance, swimming in the fucking Meer' charges he thought they'd probably slap on him, but a dozen other things as well. He shakes his head and wonders if he should call his attorney to come get him and bring a change of clothes.

When he and Tenpou and Kenren are finally all Miranda'ed and cuffed and thankfully draped with blankets and sitting in the back of a police van, it feels familiar and somehow a fitting end to the day, to find himself cuffed and sitting next to these two. The cop riding in the back with them doesn't seem to mind if they're talking to each other probably taping them, in fact so all Homura can really do is laugh to himself, curse more than a little, and pretty much wish he hadn't met Kenren and Tenpou today. But at the same time, he's really glad he did.

Then Kenren ruins the good feeling by opening his mouth. It's one of his skills that Homura hates the most.

"You know, the world won't end if you aren't out there fighting for it," Kenren says.

The euphoria crashes. What, does Kenren think Homura's too ego-bound to know that everything isn't dependent on him? He knows there are other people out there, maybe not doing as good a job as he is, but they're trying. He frowns, but before he can open his mouth in a retort, Tenpou says, "Leave something for the protesters to do."

"What do you mean?"

Tenpou smiles his otherworldly smile, and it should look creepy, him sitting there naked with an orange blanket around his skinny, unnaturally young body, crouched on a bench in the back of a police van with handcuffs on, smiling, but Homura finds it calming, in a way. Tenpou's not judging him.

"I mean, you say that those kids aren't doing anything. Well, how can they if you're already doing it?"

"That—" Homura shakes his head. He really needs to learn how to understand Tenpou, get where he's coming from, because that last sentence makes fuck-all sense to him. "It's not like there isn't a whole hell of a lot of shit out there that needs fixing," he says.

"So let them fix it," Tenpou says, looking serene. "If you want to start fixing clocks, I could use the help. Watches are keeping me busy."

"I don't want to fix clocks," Homura says. "What the hell are you talking about, anyway?"

"There are more broken clocks and watches in the world than there are power inequities," Tenpou says. "There are only six billion or so potential power inequities. There have to be ten times the number of timepieces."

Suddenly, Homura gets it. Or thinks he might, anyway. It scares him. Maybe he doesn't want to figure Tenpou out, after all. "So you're saying that since there are more broken timepieces in the world than there are people, I should fix clocks and you fix watches, and we let the punks out there fix the world?"

Tenpou beams. "A nice division of duties, wouldn't you say?"

No, it fucking well isn't. "Is this what you wanted, all along?" Homura demands. "To stop me from writing? To stop me doing what I believe in? Why? Because it justifies you two dropping out? Makes you feel a little better, screwing me over, too?"

"You've been screaming to get out of it for years," Kenren says. "Every word you write. Even I could see it."

"You ass—"

"We decided it was better than reading about you getting your head blown off or seeing a story about you stepping off a ledge," Tenpou interrupts, his voice still serene. "Besides, if you die first, you'll leave the prettiest corpse, and that wouldn't be right."

"I can leave whatever corpse I want," Homura says, and he hates it but has to admit they're right. For a long time now, he's wanted … something. Something else.

"You're both goddamned control freaks," Kenren mutters, "and fucking crazy." Then, "D'you think the cops would let me smoke?"

And that's it, it's all done, no more argument. Homura may be able to fool himself for a while, but every time he exposes a lie he's living, he's been damned if he won't face the truth, no matter how painful. Tenpou and Kenren are right, as much as he hates them for it. He's been fighting all his life; he's sick of it. Maybe he should let the punks camped out on Wall Street's front door take over. In a few years' time, they'll be parroting his words; it's not like they'll have any original thoughts, either. And maybe if they win where he hasn't, maybe if they get their piece of the pie, maybe, maybe maybe one or two of them might think to share it with others.

He takes a deep breath and lets it out. "You're in a police van. They'll fine your ass off," he points out, finally, answering Kenren in words and in silence. "Besides, your cigarettes were stolen." It makes him happy. Fuck Kenren, anyway. His ass twitches in remembrance, or maybe it's just an involuntary muscle spasm, but he's still happy that Kenren can't get everything he wants at the moment, because Homura sure as hell isn't getting everything he wants, and things need to be more equal between them. 

Inside, a piece of him is starting to like the idea of fixing clocks. He's just not sure if he should listen to that piece or not.

Kenren grunts. "You ever do the Hippie Trail?" he asks.

Homura shakes his head. 

Tenpou hums in agreement. "I've got bail," he says, "if one of you covers airfare."

"India," muses Kenren. "As long as they've got cigarettes and booze, I'm up for it."

And Homura, naked in the back of a New York City police van, in handcuffs, stinking of sex and cigarettes and the goddamned Meer, with a stiff, crusty blanket that smells like puke and piss hitched around his shoulders, smiles, too. Most of him's still pissed at the world and the two men sitting with him, handcuffed, but a part of him likes the idea of fixing clocks a little more with each pothole in the shitty New York streets and each jolt of the van's shitty shocks.

He thinks he might be on his way home. He thinks maybe he's changed his world. 

Maybe just enough.

_fin_


End file.
